The Christie Affair (27 page)

The pain that erupted in my chest was unbearable, so desperate was I to ‘unknow’ what Finbarr had just told me. From that moment, for the rest of my life, I’d dream of Alby crouching, watching our tennis games in controlled stillness, only to burst into flames before we could call him back to life.

‘It all feels like a long time ago,’ Finbarr said. ‘But it’s not. Eight years since the war ended, twelve years since it started. It’s only that the world’s changed too much, in ways it shouldn’t. And so it’s changed how time passes. The trenches were yesterday, or an hour ago. They’ll come back again tomorrow. You and
me and Alby and Ireland; that was a hundred years ago, and also every day since.’

‘And Genevieve?’

‘A thousand years ago and just this morning.’

‘But not tomorrow?’

‘No, Nan. Not tomorrow.’

The tears Miss Armstrong had wanted from me gathered in my eyes. We kept walking, so far that I knew I wouldn’t make it back to the Bellefort Hotel this night. Who would even notice? Inspector Chilton, with his sad, watchful eyes and one working arm? What did he think he knew about me? Nothing that could matter enough to change the magic of walking beside Finbarr. When I left the convent, all I’d wanted to do was walk. I would have walked the length of Ireland, and then England; I would have walked from Land’s End to Thurso. Not knowing where to look but only that there was nothing in this world for me to do but search and search and search.

Finbarr did not walk with me the length of England, but to a long drive leading to a manor house, the trees on either side so bare that I could see it up ahead in a patch of moonlight. Waiting for us. It was grand but not cavernously so. The country home of some wealthy Londoner, most likely.

‘How did you find this place? Do you have permission to stay here?’ Even as I spoke I knew he’d found it the same way he’d found our room in the midst of the Armistice celebration. Finbarr magic.

‘The house gave me permission to stay,’ he told me. ‘That’s more important than permission from the owners.’

Oak trees bent in a bald canopy overhead, sagging with the memory of their lost leaves, starlight making its way through the branches, creating a kind of mist with our exhaled breath.

‘Shall we run to the front door?’ Finbarr asked.

I laughed. But all at once, before my voice could object, my body answered. I gave myself a head start by kicking off without warning, my muscles creaky but coming to life against the cold air. Finbarr overtook me quickly but not so quickly that I didn’t feel proud, almost at his heels, the good, lost feeling of blood and breath pumping through every ventricle to every cell.

Finbarr finished, slamming against the front door. We walked inside, breathing hard, past the smouldering fire in the front hall.

‘Is Mrs Christie here?’ I asked.

‘Yes. She’s here.’

I followed Finbarr up the staircase to what must have been the grandest bedroom, his spare possessions already settled into occupancy, a scarf over a chair, a battered satchel with his father’s initials barely visible resting in a corner. Nice of Agatha, I thought, to let him have this room instead of taking it for herself. He kneeled and rebuilt the fire while I stood, watching his face in the glow. My hands cupped their opposite elbows. I knew I should be shivering until the fire crackled in earnest, but instead I felt as warm as I ever had.

Finbarr stood. He took off his coat and tossed it into a corner. He put his arms around me and pulled me close.

‘Nan,’ he said, ‘I know you grieve. I grieve, too. We’ll never forget her, but we can have another. We can be together.’

‘We can’t be together,’ I said, even as I let him ease off my coat and felt his lips against my neck. ‘Because I have to be with her. I can’t go off to live in a different hemisphere to my own child.’

‘Nan,’ he said, more sharply. He gave my shoulders a little shake, as if trying to wake me. ‘I’m right here. But she’s gone.
There’s no point in looking for something you’ll never find, or holding on to something that’s already lost.’

Finbarr had never seen or touched our baby. He could love her but he couldn’t understand. There was no point in saying so. I didn’t want to argue. This night had arrived unexpectedly, a gift out of nowhere, and I just wanted it to continue, separate in time, a little bubble away from the world and everything it had done to us. I would have traded this moment with Finbarr in an instant if it would rearrange the past. But that wasn’t possible. So I took it, never mind how it might affect the future. I hadn’t packed my contraceptive sponge when I left London. Why would I? But I found myself not caring. Anything that happened this time would be very different from the last.

‘Hush, Finbarr,’ I said. ‘Just hush.’

I silenced him with a kiss that led us to the bed, finally a place and time carved out of all these years, to be together in the way we were always meant to be.

Chilton had learned to walk silently during the war. One of the benefits of not being a tall man, and being slight in build, was that if he led with his heel, moving from the hip, he could walk with hardly any footfall, even with his longest strides.

And the truth was, even if he’d stomped, with no attention to keeping us from knowing he was there, we might not have known he was following us, so absorbed were we in each other.

But follow us he did, undetected, even when Finbarr turned to point the dog towards home. Chilton froze then, arms by his side, as if he could make himself invisible even to an animal. When Finbarr turned, and we resumed our walk, Chilton didn’t hesitate before resuming his stride. A sad pair, weren’t we?
Chilton could tell, he knew, we’d been separated by the war, only now coming back together. What he couldn’t figure out was our connection to Agatha Christie. He just knew we’d lead him directly to her. And so we did.

Once we’d turned up the drive of the house Chilton had secured our destination, so he began to take greater heed lest we discover him. He waited by the gate that Finbarr – country boy, mindful of fences – had closed and latched behind us. When we were far enough in the distance for him to be sure we wouldn’t hear it creak, Chilton opened the gate and walked down the road, noting, as I had, the bare branch canopy, and thinking how lovely it must be in spring and summer, when everything was in bloom. He breathed in the night air to calm himself – anxiety taking him unawares as it so often did; the feeling that someone might be watching him, might be lurking, behind any shadow. Yorkshire was fine but Chilton had grown up by the sea. That was the thing, the only thing: to hear the waves upon the shore. To walk upon the rocks at Churston Cove and see the seals sunning there. To thrust your head into the salt water, even in the coldest months, and let its chilling shock clear your mind.

He stood before the house, a lovely old building, a great stone box, shimmering with windows under the low light of stars. From behind one upstairs window a flicker of light grew; that would be the Irish fellow, stoking the fire for an evening with Mrs O’Dea, if that were indeed her name. Whatever had separated us, Chilton hoped it could be sorted out, that we could be together. He had lost his own sweetheart because of the war. Katherine had waited for him patiently, praying for his return, but her prayers hadn’t been complete enough, because a different man had returned in his place from the one she loved.
I scarcely recognize you, Frank
, she’d wept. Not long after she broke
things off, she married the florist’s son, who was set to inherit the business and hadn’t been to war on account of blindness in one eye. It was one of the reasons Chilton had left Brixham for Leeds, years ago. One day he’d walked by the flower shop and had seen Katherine arranging a vase full of peonies, round with expecting a child. He’d decided to take himself away as if not seeing something spared you from its sorrow.

Torquay was close enough to Brixham for Agatha Christie to have bought flowers from that shop, even from Katherine herself. Or likely not. Likely it was a servant’s job – to buy flowers.

Once over the threshold of the manor, the door shut quietly behind him. Inside it was draughty and cold. There were so few furnishings – there was so little sign of life – Chilton thought it might be waiting for sale, or to be leased. It didn’t have any air of waiting for its own family to return. He adjusted his scarf, then set about searching. It was a large house but not prohibitively so. He could make a quick turn downstairs to the kitchen, wine cellar (amply stocked for a house that seemed so deserted) and housekeeper’s office. Then through the main floor into the parlour and library. He peered into every room except for the one the couple occupied, marked by the flicker from underneath the doorway. Light voices carried into the hall, including a soft laugh that gladdened him. It was difficult to imagine either of those two laughing, both so haunted and earnest.

In the attic there was a modest servants’ quarters, with a row of closed doors. Beneath one of them, some movement, faint light, as though from a single candle. He knocked quietly, using only two of his knuckles.

‘Yes, darling,’ came the voice, weary and slightly worried, like a mother addressing a child out of bed in the middle of the night. In his own family it had not been he but his youngest brother
who woke their mother after dark. She was always sweet about it. How she loved all three of her boys.

Chilton knew Agatha’s endearment, and its implied invitation to enter wasn’t for him. Still, he pushed the door open. And there she sat, in a hard wooden chair – wearing a man’s pyjamas, hair loose and curling, lovely in the poorly lit room. There were two single beds, only one of them made up. On the dressing table, which she was using as a desk, sat a typewriter and two lit, dripping candlesticks in tarnished silver holders. Stacks of paper were piled on a chest of drawers. More stacks of paper sat on the bare bed. Agatha stared at Chilton, fountain pen in hand, poised as if in mid-sentence.

‘Oh drat,’ she said. She did not put down her pen.

He walked into the room and sat down at the foot of the bare bed, careful not to disturb her papers. He did not remove his coat. There was a small stove in the corner, alight with coal, but he suspected it would be out by morning. He imagined her waking with a shiver, breath visible. Would she rekindle the fire herself or call for the Irishman, the geography of the house revised but not their roles?

‘Mrs Mahoney,’ Chilton said, with no faint measure of sarcasm. She had to strain backwards in her chair to face him.

‘Is this how the Yorkshire police conduct themselves?’ There was a practised tone of upper-crust umbrage in her voice but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. ‘Marching into a lady’s bedroom in the middle of the night?’

‘I did knock,’ he said. ‘You were expecting your husband?’

A sad look crossed her face. Chilton did not mean to make her cry. At least, as a man, he did not. As an inspector, he recognized emotional frailty might lead to an outpouring of information.

‘I’m afraid,’ he pressed on, ‘your husband is downstairs in one of the bedrooms with another lady. I do hate to be the bearer of such unfortunate news.’

Finally, she released her pen, placing it on the bedside table with the exhalation of someone whose concentration has been truly and unwelcomely wrecked.

‘Let’s not play games,’ she said. ‘You know very well he’s not my husband.’

‘But wasn’t it he you meant when you said
darling
? He’s not—’

‘Don’t you dare say it. I’m not nearly old enough to be Finbarr’s mother.’

‘I was going to say, your brother.’

‘He has become very like a brother to me, and is indeed very darling. Though I don’t see what business it is of yours.’

‘What business it is of mine, Mrs Christie,’ Chilton switched to her true name, though she had not yet confirmed her identity, ‘is that I am employed by the Yorkshire police. There are a good many officers searching for you.’

‘A good many? Searching for me? In Yorkshire?’

‘Yorkshire and everywhere else in England.’

Agatha frowned. She couldn’t even curse her bad luck at landing in Yorkshire. If she’d run off to Derbyshire or Cumberland or Norfolk, there would be police to come knocking on the door of her hideout.

‘Gracious,’ Agatha said, exhausted by the news. ‘What a fuss.’

‘So you admit, you’re Mrs Agatha Christie?’

‘I admit no such thing.’ But she looked doubtful.

If Miss O’Dea (he had begun thinking of me as
Miss
almost without considering it) or any other woman had done what Agatha did next, Chilton would have been on guard, considering it an attempt at manipulation. But when she reached out her
hand, touching his arm, closing her fingers around the thick woollen cloth, he recognized the gesture as not woman to man, but human to human. A genuine and urgent entreaty.

‘Mr Chilton,’ she said, ‘have you ever been in trouble? Real trouble, the kind that comes not only from without but also from some place within? Some place you never even recognized?’

Her face looked open and painfully tender. Thirty-six is an age one looks back on as young. But at the time, living in thirty-six-year-old skin, it doesn’t feel young. Women start believing themselves old so soon, don’t they? Agatha didn’t realize it was her youth that allowed her to sit for hours in that comfortless rock of a chair, staring at her pages without need of spectacles, nary a twinge from the small of her back. One day far into the future she would look back on this time in her life and understand she had not been old, or even middle aged, but
young
, with the bulk of her life ahead of her, not to mention the best of it.